Zatoichi
by teawithmilk
Summary: [2003-verse; SAINW] It takes Leonardo at least a month to adjust to the loss of his sight, but it takes him twenty years to adjust to the loss of his brothers.


turtles aren't mine!

* * *

**-zatoichi-**

.

It takes Leonardo at least a month to adjust to the loss of his sight, but it takes him twenty years to adjust to the loss of his brothers. He had already watched his father be taken apart piece-by-piece, Casey too. He'd never even _seen_ what happened to Don.

And then, the was everything he'd missed by sight. April's youth. Raph's eye. Michelangelo's _arm_. In the midst of that final bloodshed, he'd walked away, becoming the _ronin_ like in the movies he'd loved when he was a kid. Couldn't even protect his family (what was even _left_ of it) - he was a _liability_. So he went, passing through Manhattan every few months when he knew Raph wasn't around and knew that Michelangelo would keep his distance. He told himself it was to check on April and Angel and the rest of the resistance, but when April would bully him into his old room with tea and a hot meal and _information_, he allowed himself to be the liar.

This night, of course, is no exception. April sits with him while he eats, giving him a report of _activity_, casually mentions a band of rebels by the old South Street Seaport (_Raph_, his mind fills in for him), another small cluster up in Turtle Bay (_Michelangelo_), and offers him a blanket. He balls it up for a pillow and lays on his side and waits.

It's always the same.

His vision clears and he gets back up, in the parking lot of the old warehouse. The last stand of their old home. What faces he remembers stare back at him - Casey, bloody and bruised and torn across the throat, Angel - the last time he saw her, she'd taken a hit to the face and so he sees her with her eye swollen closed.

He unsheathes his swords and throws himself into the fray, and that's when he realises that he's fighting alone.

Even after all these years, he still finds himself looking for his brothers, but they are no longer there.

Raph stares at him from the sidelines, his face set in stone-cold fury. To his left, what is left of their father's body, neatly stitched the way they had done to give him some semblance of dignity before they burned him. Splinter leans on his cane to take the weight off of what they found of his leg, and Raphael shifts, subtly, so that his father's weight is balanced more against his own hip than the staff.

Ever the dutiful son.

Michelangelo is on his right. The orange bandana is tattered and ragged behind him, a bloody, bandaged stump hangs from his left side and a semi-automatic is tightly clenched in the right hand. Scars have torn through his plastron and Leo can't understand how his baby brother is still in one piece.

He doesn't understand how he's suddenly twenty years old again, but that doesn't matter right now.

"Mikey," Leo hears himself say, lowering his blades and turning towards his youngest brother. "Michelangelo, _please_."

Michelangelo turns, aims the rifle to the sky and lets off a rip of bullets.

It's a siren's call.

"Leo!"

Donatello - no, _Donnie's _- voice rings out from the front lines of the approaching crowd, clear and fresh through the slasher smile carved into his face; too many teeth shining white and too much blood bubbling down the ruin of his cheek. The left hand of the exo-suit wields a rotten bo staff. The right isn't a hand at all, but a blaster. What's left of his brother smiles, waves at himself, "so, what do you think? Pretty neat, huh?" before the face-plate shutters down and he becomes as faceless as the rest of the droids he's torn apart.

"Leo? Leo!" Somewhere, April is yelling for him.

_I can't see—_

He can't see her. His hands grasp at the air and she cups his wrist and guides both of his hands to hers. "Leo," she says again, and he chokes (_oh, he was screaming again? great_) and clings to that voice like an anchor. "It's alright," she soothes, and the crowd clears to black. "It's not real."

He shakes his head, kicks off the longcoat from where he'd used it as a makeshift blanket. "No." He doesn't let go of her hands, and he forces himself to accept that this is okay. It's April.

It's not okay.

But it is real. His thumbs run along the side of April's hands - there's a long, jagged scar curling up the flesh of her thumb and up to her wrist, and he focuses on it, committing it to memory.

Because he can't see the scars on April. Because he doesn't know what they look like.

The irony brands him - he has to see _nothing_ to know that what he is seeing is _real_.

-end-


End file.
